HAVING spent more than 20 years as one of the most watchable movie stars around, our very own Ewan McGregor turns his hand to directing with an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 novel by Philip Roth. The result is a well-intentioned but tonally misjudged oddity, one that awkwardly fumbles the form of the source material while also lacking its dramatic punch.
We start with a 40-year high school reunion where Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn) is told by a childhood friend how his friend’s older brother – a legendary local figure in the quaint New Jersey town – passed away after living a life that went from privilege to tragedy due to dramatic events beyond his control.
We then jump back to the unrest of the 1960s and into the life of Seymour “Swede” Levov (played by McGregor himself), a beloved former high school athlete who went on to run a pretty successful business and live a well-off life with his beautiful but vain wife Dawn (Jennifer Connelly) and passionate daughter Merry (Dakota Fanning).
As she grows up Merry increasingly comes to hate the way her parents exist in, as she sees it, a comfortable bubble of blissful ignorance. One day she begins to actively revolt, getting involved with some unsavoury characters in New York City. When a bomb goes off in the local post office and Merry is believed to be responsible, Swede tries his best to make sense of the hitherto pleasant life that is now crumbling around him.
Despite the source novel’s inherent power and complexities of exploring the turbulent events of late ‘60s America – the Vietnam War, racial divides et al – through the lens of a white middle class man made to sit up and take notice, McGregor’s adaptation comes across as messy, flat and more than a little dull.
The depiction of the era feels utterly stagey and implausible, more like an idea of what it was like rather than a convincing immersion in the period. Some of the stilted, tin-eared dialogue in John Romano’s script has all the grace of a bunch of pots and pans falling down the stairs. It aims for some of the same things as Mad Men, Revolutionary Road and Carol but falls well short of the mark.
It’s reasonably well-performed, particularly by McGregor, and there’s no doubting the sincerity in his intentions as a first time director. But this tonally lifeless, emotionally lacking drama ends up as a curious cinematic failure.
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